Being a big fan of Desert Combat mod for Battlefield 1942 I have tried the Battlefield 2 Demo the day it was released. It was all I expected and even more. However the old glitches with "laggy" and "sticky" server search screen still remained in this version of the game...
So I told myself that it was probably just a demo, that release will have all of that fixed, and have purchased the game shortly after it was released to retailers.
First impression was - "WOW", the graphics where awesome, the intro movie gave me goose bumps and certain aspects of game-play seemed very innovative. Allow me to extrapolate on that.
Graphics engine is probably one of the best to date, with Counter Strike: Source being the closes thing I have seen on the market so far. Battlefield 2 actually contains something that most products of this genre are missing - interactive environment. You can drive your vehicles through fences, blow up fuel tanks and bridges... and then come back to repair them. Extremely realistic looking models for numerous vehicles, soldier types and weapons for three different armies (USMC, MEC and China Liberation Force) add more than enough eye candy to the state-of-the-art game-play.
Talking about the game-play, you have probably never played anything like this before (even if you have tried Battlefield 1942 combined with all of its numerous modifications). The basic capture-the-flag system is still there, but now you have a whole new hierarchy of squad-leaders and commanders directing the battle. In a manner of speaking, Electronic Arts has managed to combine a First Person Shooter with a Step-by-step Strategy and... get this... MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game). Yes, you get to gain experience points and advance through ranks, gaining better weapons and combat medals (such as Purple Heart) for your performance in battles.
But let's get back to the Squads and Commanders for just a minute. Every team is given an opportunity to form into squads and choose a commander from people that have applied to be one for the current round (higher ranked officers get priority at the time of commander elections). Commanders get to fully experience the Strategy of the modern battlefield for they are equipped with the live satellite connection that provides them with an overview of the entire map, with the ability to zoom-in, pinpoint and perform different actions on enemy and friendly units. They can call artillery strikes, provide supplies, local area scans or simply give orders to the squads.
When the order is given to the squad by the Commander, the Squad Leader can choose to either accept or reject it. If the order is received, the points of interest are marked with coloured flares and direction markers, visible only to the particular squad pursuing them. Squad Leader can also send/forward squad members' requests for the artillery, supplies or local area scans to the Commander.
During the game-play, each of the players will receive game points for completing their duties. Believe it or not you get these contribution points for literally everything. Be it healing people, repairing their vehicles, driving the vehicles with passengers, capturing bases or just helping to capture bases - you are always rewarded with a corresponding amount of team contribution points that at the end add up to determine your ranking and perhaps even an award. Commanders receive double their contribution points. Talk about being realistic, eh ;)
However, as exciting as the actual game-play was the product as a whole is a little disappointing in its performance and stability. The first unpleasant surprise came when I got disconnected from the account server after playing for about 10 minutes or so...
I have played a game for quite a while now, thus I will feel pretty confident listing a few very annoying glitches this game has in its release version (which one would think a company as big and respectable as EA would have fixed before charging people money for it). But here is a short list of bugs that seem to repeat themselves quite often:
- Server search screen is irresponsive, taking up to 10 minutes to find the servers;
- Server search filters work poorly, sometimes after an unsuccessful search the only way to see any servers again is to restart the game;
- Account servers are extremely unreliable and your ranking may not get updated for hours after you have achieved the number of points required;
- At times your team-mates will appear as your enemies to you and by shooting them you will receive team-kills which may get you banned from the server and will lover your score ranking;
- Sometimes the game will just close. No error. No warning. Just your desktop with the reflection of your puzzled look in it.
As you can see, most of the errors seem to be tied in with the account servers and the pre-game, server selection interfaces (which are done with cooperation of somewhat famous third parties such as Punkbuster and GameSpy).
For example, I have just had to re-install the game, because for some reason my account, that I have spent days on, to get ranks and unlock weapons, is now unable to login into a single game server. This have happened before but not to this level of severity, and as long as I am connected to the server the actual game-play seems to flow rather smoothly.
The game might sound much more complicated at the first sight, but the new comprehensive interface and step-by-step vocal instructions that are optionally provided to the new players help them get accustomed with it in the matter of hours.
So, all said and done, if you, like myself, have always praised EA for being one of the best game developers of all times, you may want to give it a few months before you buy the game, just to give EA time to patch it up a little... or you may suffer the disappointment of having to struggle with it for half an hour every time you want to get into a different server.
Thank you for your time reading this review and I hope you have found it as useful as I intended it to be. Frag you later.
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